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FIRE has been busy taking its message to the streets this week, with Luke and I spending Wednesday signing up new CFN members at this year’s Campus Progress Conference in Washington, D.C., and Greg, Brandon, Alisha, and Adam jetting off to sunny Las Vegas for the annual FreedomFest Conference. Fortunately, with FIRE a bit short on manpower for much of the week, our industrious summer interns have kept the ball rolling. Notably, Noah Baron put his internship to good use in writing for the blog of the Columbia Spectator, calling attention to Columbia University’s “truly bizarre and disturbing” speech codes.

The law and higher education blogs have been buzzing this week in the wake of the latest ruling in former professor Ward Churchill’s case against the University of Colorado, in which Judge Larry J. Naves vacated a previous jury verdict in Churchill’s favor while rejecting calls for his reinstatement. Greg is one of the many key figures to offer comment on the verdict this week, which you can read about in Peter Schmidt’s article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Lastly (as Kyle noted earlier), FIRE Co-founder and Chairman Harvey Silverglate awarded his annual New England collegiate Muzzle Awards in The Boston Phoenix this week, with Quinnipiac University one of 2009’s big “winners” (read: losers) for its treatment of The Quad News. The news reminds me of my very first post on The Torch about Harvey’s 2008 Muzzle Awards, which singled out Brandeis University for shaming over its continuing mistreatment of Professor Donald Hindley. Quinnipiac, at least, eventually got its act together. The same (still) can’t be said for Justice Louis Brandeis’ namesake university.